![]() BuzzFeed isn’t owned by Silicon Valley billionaires, but it does rely on their venture capital funding. ![]() The man who owns Amazon also owns the Washington Post a co-founder of Facebook bought and overhauled and then sold the New Republic even the Intercept, an explicitly investigative enterprise, owes its existence to a tech magnate. That’s partly because, as Adrienne LaFrance observes in an essay for Nieman Reports, the technology industry now enjoys unprecedented power over the media. With Valleywag already dead of (mostly) natural causes and Gawker by Thiel’s hand, who in the media should we expect to carry on their legacy, particularly with respect to the demimonde that Thiel inhabits, the high-flying society and culture of Silicon Valley and the technology industry? ![]() What good work does he think Gawker did? What made him think that good work would continue following the company’s bankruptcy? And exactly when did the man who crushed Gawker grow so concerned about people insulting it?īut let’s try for at least a moment to take this claim seriously. “As for Gawker,” he added, “whatever good work it did will continue in the future, and suggesting otherwise would be an insult to its writers and to readers.” What exactly Thiel meant by that particular sentence is hard to parse. Rather, he argued, it was a defense of online privacy, and therefore no one need fear a broader chilling effect on America’s press freedom. In a New York Times op-ed earlier this week, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder argued that his backing of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker wasn’t simply an act of revenge for a 2007 Valleywag post that outed him as gay. ![]() Which is, of course, exactly what Thiel intended. That sounds like a nail in the coffin for the brand of hypocrisy-shaming dirt-dishing that Gawker and its defunct sibling Valleywag pioneered. On Thursday, the fallout from Peter Thiel’s vendetta against Gawker Media continued with the news that the company’s flagship blog, Gawker, will shut down, even as its other properties live on under new ownership. ![]()
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